In Praise of Social Sites & Twittering & Kudos!

Anyone who has read this blog more than a few times knows that I'm a fan of twitter, and you can see off to the left that I'm a fan of social sites as well. Just this week I joined the Book Blog group and friended Joel Schwartzberg whose book "The 40 Year Old Version: Humoirs of a Divorced Dad" came out this month. I am writing a novel, and I need all of the insight I can get! The fascinating thing is that just two months ago I read Joel's essay in Newsweek on "Slouching Towards Fatherood" which I loved! It's been great to get to know him a little and to find out vicariously what it's like to be the author of a book that's starting to get a good word-of-mouth buzz. Joel doesn't have a publicist so he's doing the promoting himself (you'd probably be surprised at how many authors do this, good PR in the book world can be very expensive), and he's doing a great job using the Internet as the fantastic resource that it is. I'm happy to see I can now follow him on Twitter too.

But with sites like Twitter and Facebook and the myriad of others how do you keep things straight? How do you figure out who to follow? My rule is to focus and decide ahead of time the purpose of each social site. My Twitter is for following national news and subjects I want to know more about. So if you were to look through my Twitter "following" you'd see top news sites like Time, Newsweek and BusinessWeek, you'd see writers in the genre I'm interested in like Neil Gaiman, you'd see publicists, inspirational leaders, and those at the cutting edge of green thinking and better eating. I love knowing what random thoughts, ideas and links the movers and shakers in those industries are thinking about. You will not find any of my friends unless they happen to be entrepreneurs in industries I'm passionate about (like Naja Tea and Susan Dopart).

Still think twitter is a waste of time? You might want to think again. Recently I was able to place both my client event professional Ryan Choura and the non profit foodbank Food Finders on our local PBS station KCET's program SoCalConnected in an episode called "Second Helpings" focusing on how to avoid wasting food that could be going to the homeless because I follow their host/reporter Val Zavala on Twitter. Not bad!

I don't make my own facebook page public because I keep that for people I really know in person or stuff going on in my local Long Beach, otherwise it would be overwhelming.

In other news a shout out to Long Beach's Bikestation for being the subject of this great article recently in BusinessWeek about proactively moving from a non profit to a "for profit social cause" company. It's a great company with a great cause with new stations popping up all over the country soon!